Netsight Blog

Having been part of the team exhibiting on the Plone stand for two previous technology shows, IMS and TFM&A, it was a nice change to be on the other side when I visited Internet World this week. Seemed a busy show, particularly the talks which resembled a popular Boxing Day sale.

However, for me, the single biggest surprise from the show was the sales methods I encountered from some CMS (Content Management System) vendors. Particularly when they realised I was from a digital agency. Even as someone who's involved in business development, the number of times that kickbacks and mark-ups (linked directly to the licence fee) were promised to me seemed to be, dare I say it, a little bit underhand and desperate. Next time someone recommends a particular piece of licensed software to meet your needs, certainly worth double-checking why.

I was also amazed at the details of some so-called 'transparent pricing' schemes - where some vendors will charge you additional licence costs for any of their (sometimes as many as forty) plug-ins, covering requirements as common as a contact form. And then want to charge you the whole licence figure again for using the same CMS on a second website.

Admittedly, I'm probably dwelling on the worst examples, rather than the many people who were going about their business professionally in the very crowded proprietary CMS market.

But the whole experience made me realise the extent of the positive message behind Open Source software. Not being a developer, I take it for granted that there's a huge library of plug-ins that can be offered to our clients at no licence cost. And that when someone likes an Open Source CMS so much they recommend it to their colleagues for something similar on another site, it's nice that there's not a large licence cost to bear.

At the end of the day, obviously all companies need to make a living - and Open Source providers are no different. But even if you never need access to a program's Open Source code, there's also something to be said about the value for money and culture of common sense and fairness that also comes with choosing Open Source.

Is Open Source a viable way for the public sector to contain its IT costs? Government policy is gradually becoming more favourable to open source. Many commentators identify open source as a way to contain spiralling project costs. Yet much of this discussion is driven by underlying agendas: it contains as much disinformation as realistic appraisal of the capabilities of open source software.

The BCS Open Source Specialist Group is organising an event to look at the reality behind the rhetoric. Responding to the challenge in the above Guardian article, we aim to bring together a group of information management practitioners and vendors to discuss their experience of web and document management in the public sector. The event will consist of a series of talks, panel sessions and open discussion of the challenges of web and document management in the public sector, and the ways in which open source software might be suitable for addressing these challenges.

Netsight Technical Director, Matt Hamilton will be speaking at the event and presenting a series of mini case-studies on public sector organisations successfully using the Plone content management system to provide services with much more transparent costs.

Full details of the event including location and registration details can be found at the BCS website.

Last week I presented a case study talk at IMS 2009 in London. The talk was entitled 'The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a large Corporate Intranet'.

The slidecast with audio is below, or you can download the PDF version of the slides, or the MP3 version of the audio.

Abstract

The advantages of Open Source systems go beyond simple cost savings. Content management by its very nature requires a significant level of customisation and integration to meet business requirements. By not prohibiting the inspection and modification of the source code, Open Source enables a level of flexibility not available with proprietary systems.

This talk will present a case study of the process one corporation, Belron, went through in the development of a corporate Intranet based on Plone. Belron is the world's largest vehicle glass repair and replacement company, owning some of the best known brands in the industry including Carglass, Autoglass, O'Brien and Safelite. Belron employs more than 19, 500 people working in 28 countries worldwide.

In this talk you will see how the flexibility of Open Source allowed an initial modest Intranet to adapt and grow over time to an organisation's evolving requirements, and the development of multiple sub-sites, specific business processes and multilingual support. You will also see how Open Source's licensing model allows un-fettered growth and deployment of the Intranet to multiple countries.

A blog post today by Janus Boye on some (quite unbelievable) claims by Danish CMS vendor Sitecore got me thinking about something...

Several analysts have talked about the growing trend towards Open Source for Content Management systems. Many people still have this outdated view that Open Source means a free lunch. Well, in the CMS space it doesn't really. You do still need to go through all the due diligence, planning, requirements gathering, customisation, etc that you would do with a commercial system. The main difference being that you are not taking a big hit up front for the license fees and can be a lot more flexible in your approach to the development on top of the CMS as you are not held back by vendor licensing, and are not beholden to one single vendor company.

Commercial CMS vendors like to try and debunk that Open Source gives a lower TCO in a project by stating that the licensing fees are only a small part of the total TCO, and the main chunk is made up of points mentioned above (planning, implementation, etc).

If that is the case and fast forwarding a few years to the point that all CMSes become 'Open Source' (or claim they are Open Source by just giving away some freebie version, or dropping their license fees altogether) how will companies like Sitecore survive, whom according to their numbers in Janus' blog post earned DKK 76M out of a total DKK 79M by license revenue? If the license fees is such a small insignificant part of the total cost of a CMS implementation then how can you base an entire company revenue stream on it?

Well, I'm now back from the 7th Annual Plone Conference 2009 in Budapest, sat at my desk with the post-conference come-down as the excitement of a conference fades away. Once again the Plone community has come together and put on an absolutely awesome event. Considering the general doom and gloom about the world economy, it was amazing to see over 400 people attend the conference (I think this is the largest yet).

Netsight had a delegation of 6 people this year: Adam, Adrian, Ben, Daniel, Matt H, and Matt SS, plus honorary Netsighter Dan Fairs along as well. Daniel gave a talk on "Extending Plone: Using python to integrate with external data sources" showing people new to Plone how easy it is to extend Plone with a few lines of python code to get data from Google Docs, Twitter and YouTube into Plone. Matt SS gave two lightning talks, the first one 'Products.TranslateInPlace' which allows you to update Plone's UI translations whilst browsing the site so you can see the translations in context. The second was a practical demonstration on some work we've been doing on re-skinning a legacy .NET portal using Deliverance.

I co-presented a talk with Steve McMahon on 'How Does Plone Happen?' in which we had a very informal, tag-team, talk about the various aspects of how Plone is developed and how the people behind the code, the release process, the day to day chat and support on the Plone IRC channel and mailing lists all adds up to create the multi-million dollar value body of work we call Plone, and the Foundation that protects and promotes it.

At the last minute I was also asked to be on a panel discussion led by Sally Kleinfeldt of Jazkarta on Plone Web Services, along with Matthew Wilkes, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, and Alec Mitchell. We discussed the various existing ways of getting data in and out of Plone via XML-RPC, WebDAV etc. and also the new AtomPub WSGI middleware for Plone written by Chelsea Bingiel as part of the Google Summer of Code. We also discussed the pros and cons of looking to implement CMIS, a proposed standard for interoperability of CMSes.

The conference as a whole was extremely well organised, and credit goes to Balazs Ree and the rest of the organising team from Greenfinity and the other volunteers for their hard work in making it such a success. Budapest is such a beautiful city for the event and a great host country.

I was involved in the production of the conference talks schedule this year and leading the talks committee. After putting the call out for talk submissions we had over 70 talks for about 45 slots available, which unfortunately meant that we didn't have space to fit all of them in the time available. I have to say though, this year that quality of the talks -- not just their content, but delivery -- exceeded all previous years.

It was great to see what is coming up in Plone 4 and a chance for conference attendees to ask the Plone core developers and Framework team any questions they had about features of the upcoming release. For me, personally though, the talks that really showed how far we've come as a community over the years were the number and quality of the business and case study talks I managed to get to:

• Frank DiMauro from UNC Healthcare System in the US on the CMS Impact on Corporate Culture
• Francesco Ciriaci from Reflab in Italy on the Medicins Sans Frontieres International Intranet
• Peter Breithaupt from N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie in The Netherlands talking about his experiences and successes of getting Plone introduced into large scale business operations
• Chantal Foster and Alex Sielicki from FosterMilo in the US talking about getting Plone into three Government institutions in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It's talks like these that show that Plone, both as a CMS and as a community really are able to provide large organisations with the solution they need, and with far more flexibility and agility than many commercial CMS rivals.

Plone is promoted and protected by the Plone Foundation, a not for profit legal foundation that holds the IP of Plone. Each year the foundation elects a new board of directors, whose job it is to oversee the legal and promotional aspects of Plone. It is tradition for the final board meeting of the board each year, the AGM, to be held at the Plone Conference. The board presented the accounts for the foundation and spoke briefly of the achievements in the past year, including the introduction of a relicensing policy for Plone components, and guidelines around logo usage and its new marketing budget. The fact we now have a budget for marketing is a testament to the community and the generous companies that sponsor the Plone Foundation.

This year, I ran again for the Plone Foundation board and was elected onto the new board. Its an honour to be re-elected by my community peers and to serve again on the board. Once again we have a great bunch of people on the board, and will carry forward on the momentum of the previous year to make Plone even better.

At the end of the second day, there was the conference dinner at the Museum of Transportation. There was something quite surreal, but very pleasing about being sat drinking a beer with other Plonistas in a vintage railway carriage! Looking around upstairs at some of the photos of Budapest's shipping heritage made me do a double take as quite a few photos looked identical to Bristol city docks.

The third day was started off with a Keynote by Georg Greve of the Free Software Foundation Europe, entitled 'Rising to the Challenge of our Own Success'.

Then we had something new for the conference: an Open Space day. The third day had absolutely no agenda before the conference began. In an Open Space (also known as an unconference) the attendees themselves propose talks and put them up on a large board and a schedule is created organically by the people at the event. This fell under my remit to organise, something which I have to admit I was a bit nervous about, as I was quite worried that we'd end up with an empty board an no talks. Of course I needn't have worried at all. Within about 10 minutes of putting the board up, the majority of the slots were filled, and within an hour the board was full.

I proposed a talk on 'Plone Marketing - Producing brochures and case studies' which was very well attended with about 20-30 people there all interested in promoting Plone further and producing high quality marketing materials.

Overall, from the feedback I've had the Open Spaces day worked very well, and I think we should repeat it again next year. And if I'm involved in it next year I promise I won't forget how to count and mess up the timeslots as I did this year ;)

Anyways, I'd just like to repeat again what an amazing event it was, and what a fantastic community Plone is. It really is something that sets Plone the software apart from other CMS systems out there.

If you missed out, you can catch up with some of the banter on Twitter and see the photos of the event on Flickr. Also a bunch of the talks were streamed live and recorded on ustream.tv. A few of the presentations are on slideshare too. Maurits van Rees did an excellent job live blogging all the talks he was in.

-Matt

This week there has been quite a few big news items about Open Source. One of them is that the White House announced its move from its previous CMS system to the Open Source CMS Drupal.

Whilst this was some pretty big news about the US government adopting Open Source, I do think they did slightly over-egg the cake. Both the FBI and the CIA have been running the Open Source Plone CMS for a number of years already on for their public websites, so Open Source is already running some pretty prominent sites for the US Government.

Yesterday, Chris Wilson from Slate published a blog post entitled 'Why running the White House Web site on Drupal is a political disaster waiting to happen.'. In the blog post he makes some pretty scathing remarks about Drupal, which I think possibly deserve a bit more investigation.

In his article he states that Drupal is impenetrable, hates change, disorganised and righteous. Now, I don't know a huge amount about the internals of Drupal and its community, but I think some of these remarks need a bit more context:

"...a lot of ordinary, code-fearing people who just want a simple Web site are getting left behind". Well, this isn't just a simple Website. OK, so it might not be the most amazingly complex website and might not be much more than a news site for what's going on in the Whitehouse, but it *is* a pretty prominent website. If a user 'just wants a simple website' then I'd suggest that looking at Drupal might be the wrong thing to be doing. It is a pretty large CMS, similar in scale to Plone, or many of the mid-range CMS systems out there. Indeed CMS Watch list in the same category as Drupal and Plone: OpenText, Sitecore, EpiServer, Alterian. Now I doubt anyone would serious suggest any of these systems would be where you would start for 'a simple website'. As for being 'hostile to newcomers' or its 'learning curve' I would take a guess that whatever internal, proprietary .NET system the Whitehouse used to use would be far worse.

I think most of this comes from a common misconception I have seen over the years, and that is people think that just because they can download and install an Open Source CMS for free and have it up and running in 15 minutes, that they don't need to actually spend time learning how to use a system. Again, compare to commercial CMS systems (or any commercial software for that matter). When you procure such a system you generally include a significant amount of end user training, or developer training. Why do you think that this needs to be skimped with an Open Source CMS? Granted, I know Plone is still significantly easier to use and more intuitive than many other systems out there, I still wouldn't wander blindly into it without either taking advantage of some training or being comfortable in going and asking for help yourself.

On Twitter, someone responded to Chris' blog asking 'What would you recommend then?' and he responded 'Probably Alfresco, though there's certainly no such thing as a perfect CMS.'. I would challenge Chris to pick up Alfresco and try and apply the criticisms he levels at Drupal to it and see how it holds up.

I do know that Plone is certainly a lot better on some of those criticisms, and sat here at the Plone Conference 2009 in Budapest, that Plone has a pretty vibrant and friendly community. Combined with its outstanding security track record this could be why, as posted by Karl Horek on his Plone Metrics blog, Why so many government sites use Plone.

Yesterday I saw a news item go past on Twitter. The item in questions was by a digital agency called Sequence whom implement the Alterian CMS. Their news item originally make the ludicrous claim that they had released the first CMS that supports the Welsh language.

I was actually alerted to this by a Twitter post which translates as 'First Welsh CMS? A complete lie (see joomla / wordpress / plone / sharepoint)'. I contacted Sequence and pointed out to them that they are nearly three years behind Plone (other systems may have been before then even), as Russ Ferriday of Topia demonstrated the Welsh translation of Plone back in 2006. And Plone has been shipping with a Welsh translation out of the box ever since.

Sequence then issued an apology and revised their news item (you see the revised one in the link above). Their apology is that the word 'Enterprise' was edited out of their news item.

This still leaves the claim:

"Sequence have made available what is believed to be the first enterprise CMS (content management system) available in the Welsh language, creating a unique 'back-end' technology system in Wales' national language."

So I guess that leaves the questions as to is Plone an 'Enterprise' CMS? I've always thought the word 'enterprise' to be a particularly nebulous term and originated as a term for commercial vendors to add a few extra zeros to the price tag of whatever they were selling.

Whatever the definition, I'm sure the likes of Novell, Akamai, Belron, Konica, Uniq, Honda and many others might fit it.

I've just read an interesting article over at CMS Watch by one of their Analysts, Adriaan Bloem, entitled Open Source: It's Just a License.

In it Adriaan discusses TCO costs for Open Source vs. Commercial and mentions that there are a lot of gray areas between Open Source and Closed Source systems. In the end he sums it up pretty well with a great piece of advice:

"There's only one thing you can generalize: open source is a specific kind of license. And discussions about which license is better are rather academic. What you'd want to decide on is what your software should do, if and how you want to customize it, and how easy it is to get support when you need it. That means doing your homework, and finding out the real story: you'll certainly want to know what's behind the facade. And that's something that applies to software under any license."

I'd like to actually take this even further, as there is a point further up the article in which he talks about costs with some example numbers:

"Get out your calculator and tell me this: what's more expensive over the course of three years. Software that's $30K up front, with a 15% annual maintenance and support fee; or software that's "free," but with $15K a year in "gold support"? Or, if you're planning on doing it yourself, one FTE?"

You could pretty much pick any numbers out of the air to make this argument and you could make it go either way pretty easily. However it misses a pretty big point for Open Source, and that is control.

Those costs above are a pretty small part of the equation if we are talking about Enterprise-level content management systems. And indeed its a point Adriaan makes:

"It's just an example, but you get the point -- it's very hard to do an enterprise implementation cheap, whichever way you turn it."

Anyone who has done any kind of CMS deployment in a large organisation know that the CMS they procure 'out of the box' is only going to be about 20% of the way towards their end goal. The rest is going to be customisation towards their specific business requirements, processes, branding, etc; and working out what they actually want to do. The key point is how easily does the CMS that you procure allow you to customise it to get the remaining 80% done?

With Open Source you get the choice of how you want to spend your budget. Make no mistake, you are still going to have to spend some money (see above, you have 80% still to do) but you get the flexibility to spend it how you want and when you want. You could start off with installing and evaluating an Open Source CMS with very little initial outlay. Then, as you build the system up and start to implement your requirements, you have the choice of how to do it: you can do it with internal development resources or you can hire in external help (or contract the development out). You can do it with a mix of these at different points in your project as you deem fit.

Furthermore with Community Open Source (as opposed to 'Commercial Open Source' in which, usually, a single vendor produces a system then open sources it) you have a choice of development partner. This is a pretty critical point. You can choose if you want a small local one-man-band with lower costs, or a large consulting company with full-on project management and offices around the globe. You get to pick what fits best in with your organisation... and even better... you are not locked in to them! Should for whatever reason you need to move development partner, then you can pick another one. Each of these companies will (should) have equal access to the core development of the system you have chosen and be able to make changes and fixes on your behalf. With closed source systems you might have a choice of VAR/Integrator/Developer, but in most cases these companies will still be one step removed from the software and have to go via the original software vendor to make any changes.

You also have lower risk with Community Open Source systems. There is no one central company that could go bust or be bought out by another vendor and end your CMS. Just look at the number of vendors acquiring other vendors in the commercial CMS space (there has been quite a flurry recently). These acquisitions are often to bolster an area of the portfolio that the vendor is weak in, but as a side effect they often acquire pieces that are superfluous to their current offerings and may be dropped. And when they are you are in trouble. The same risk is also present with 'Commercial Open Source' too if Alfresco, Hippo or Magnolia went bust then whilst their code might be Open Source, you have just lost the single dominant force in the development and may also have lost support, mailing lists, bug trackers, etc with them too.

So back to Adriaan's advice: "What you'd want to decide on is what your software should do, if and how you want to customize it, and how easy it is to get support when you need it." Do your homework, look at the different systems out there and make an informed choice. Just make sure that whatever system you choose gives you the flexibility and security that you know that you will be able to make the changes you need not only now, but three years down the line when you inevitably procure that new sparkly CRM/ERP/HR system. ;)

Yesterday was World Plone Day, a series of events held around the globe to promote Plone and Open Source in general. In my role as one of the directors of the Plone Foundation I was kindly invited by Jonathan Camilleri Bowman of 2i Ltd to come and present at their World Plone Day event in Valletta, Malta. Needless to say, it was an offer I jumped at, as it was a chance to visit Malta, somewhere I've never been before, but also a chance to see how Plone was being used by a central government.

Malta is an interesting place with a mix of Mediterranean and British cultures. They drive on the correct side of the road (left), their road signs are in English, and their buses and lorries all beautiful old vintage British Leylands, Bristols and AECs. And yet, their buildings are all low, limestone rendered structures, many only half finished in that typical relaxed Mediterranean style. There are something like 360 churches across the island, wherever you are you can see one. Oh, and the sun shines and of course there are beaches everywhere. Maltese is a mix of Arabic and Italian.. with smatterings of pretty much every other language in there. As Jonathan told me: 'Pretty much everyone has invaded Malta at some time'.

Today Malta has a population of about 400,000 people (approx the same size as the city of Bristol) and its main industries are shipping (many large container ships stop to refuel and reload here), finance and tourism. Since Malta joined the EU in 2004, it has been seen as a very favorable location for business due to its adoption of the Euro, its official second language of English, and its welcoming tax rates.

The World Plone day event organised by 2i was aimed specifically at the public sector here in Malta, and was held in the Chamber of Commerce in the capitol city of Valetta. There were both delegates and speakers from various government departments, including the opening address by Mr Claudio Grech chairman of MITA, the Malta Information Technology Agency. MITA is the prime agency appointed by the government to implement ICT on its behalf and reports directly to the Minister of Communications.

I was presenting two talks, one a case study on the Kent Connects Portals project, and talking about their Open Source 'journey' starting with discovering Plone and using it out of the box, through to engaging 3rd party support and development as the project grew. The second talk I did was on the Plone Community -- one of Plone's great strengths. I covered the vast array of support out their available for Plone from one-to-one training, to conferences, sprints, Plone Bootcamps, books, irc channel etc. When I was first proposing my talk, I was a bit worried I wouldn't have enough material to cover half an hour of a talk, but once you look at how wide the community is and what is going on, you realise just how much support for Plone there is out there. Of course, I also covered the Plone Foundation and its role within the community to promote and protect Plone and offer some of the aspects that many Open Source projects lack, such as marketing support, legal help and trademark protection.

There were also talks by Mr Michel Bugeja from the Government Enterprise Architecture Unit and from Mr Cedric Mallia of the Government Quality Assurance Unit talking about Plone and Open Source respectively. Every single government IT project has to pass through these two departments to be vetted, so to have representatives from both of them speaking at this event shows very strong support for both Plone and Open Source in general in Malta. Mr Karl Pullicino presented a case study of Plone's use in the Office of the Prime Minister.

The total attendance was about 70 people, an amazing turn out for such a targeted event. My hat goes off to 2i's team in organising this, I know I might struggle to get 70 government officials to attend a Plone seminar in London, let alone such a compact country as Malta.

The evening before, Jonathan had been telling me of the dominant position of Microsoft in the country. Every student can buy the entire Microsoft suite including tools such as Visual Studio for about GBP 7. And as you'd might expect the majority of the systems in government are based on Microsoft technologies. Earlier in the day, he pointed out Paul Allen's yacht, Octopus, in the bay dwarfing the battlements and stone walls surrounding it. Hrmm....

This however makes it all the more interesting to see Plone being used in such a Microsoft-centric environment. Many people still believe that Open Source and proprietary software are mutually exclusive in an organisation. At a conference I was at in Manchester earlier in the month, Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer commented on how he never understood people when they said 'We don't use Open Source, we are a Microsoft shop'. Surely people should be using the most appropriate tools for the job?

2i is a very good example of using the best tools for the job. They have historically been a 'Microsoft shop' and are a Microsoft Certified (soon to be Gold) Partner, and they develop in some of the most traditional bastions of commercial software, the likes of business intelligence and reporting. Yet when looking at content management, they got tired of not being able to do what they wanted with Sharepoint and started to look around and found Plone. Plone has offered them a way to provide the functionality that their clients need regardless of the platform or existing technologies they are using.

After the WPD event and a quick tour around Malta, I was invited by Michel Bugeja along to a Plone users group hosted by MITA at their offices. Again, a very well attended event with about 20 people from MITA there to discuss specific questions about Plone. Topics ranged from load balancing, and setting up a ZEO cluster behind a Microsoft ISA server, integration with Malta's central authentication, aggregating searches from external systems and communicating via SOAP to other .NET systems. There were also questions about more community oriented aspects of Plone, such as how to go about finding others interested in what you might be developing and how to release a product you have developed into the community.

So the end result was an amazing couple of events in Malta, really showing a lot of support for Plone and showing it in use at the national government level. I'm looking forward to seeing, and hopefully be involved in, Plone's use increasing even further both in Malta, in the UK and of course across the globe. After all... that what we set out to achieve with World Plone Day.